We all benefit from the amazing volunteer work done by the open source community. That’s why we keep asking ourselves how to take the model pioneered with our Vulnerability Reward Program - and employ it to improve the security of key third-party software critical to the health of the entire Internet.

We thought about simply kicking off an OSS bug-hunting program, but this approach can easily backfire. In addition to valid reports, bug bounties invite a significant volume of spurious traffic - enough to completely overwhelm a small community of volunteers. On top of this, fixing a problem often requires more effort than finding it.

So we decided to try something new: provide financial incentives for down-to-earth, proactive improvements that go beyond merely fixing a known security bug. Whether you want to switch to a more secure allocator, to add privilege separation, to clean up a bunch of sketchy calls to strcat(), or even just to enable ASLR - we want to help!

We intend to roll out the program gradually, based on the quality of the received submissions and the feedback from the developer community. For the initial run, we decided to limit the scope to the following projects:

Security-critical, commonly used components of the Linux kernel (including KVM)

We intend to soon extend the program to:

Widely used web servers: Apache httpd, lighttpd, nginx

Popular SMTP services: Sendmail, Postfix, Exim

Toolchain security improvements for GCC, binutils, and llvm

Virtual private networking: OpenVPN

How to participate?

Please submit your patches directly to the maintainers of the individual projects. Once your patch is accepted and merged into the repository, please send all the relevant details to security-patches@google.com. If we think that the submission has a demonstrable, positive impact on the security of the project, you will qualify for a reward ranging from $500 to $3,133.7.

Before participating, please read the official rules posted on this page; the document provides additional information about eligibility, rewards, and other important stuff.

I can make many times the maximum reward provided here by weaponizing what I find in the popular projects mentioned, and providing disinformation and bug obfuscation to appear to fix it and take your money as well. Given the fact that a massive portion of bug finders feed directly into the arsenals of nation states and other malicious actors, it would REALLY be doing the world a favor if you paid enough to cause someone who knows about the bugs in this software to come forward about it. Because right now the electronic arms buyers are outbidding you by a dramatic margin.

"Reactive patches that merely address a single, previously discovered vulnerability will typically not be eligible for rewards." (from https://www.google.com/about/appsecurity/patch-rewards/) – in other words, finding an issue, then submitting a patch that fixes it is not in scope?